


ex-voto.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Demon Dean Winchester, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-17 01:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2291180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>ex voto suscepto, from the vow made</p></blockquote>





	ex-voto.

When Dean rose from the dead, he felt heat rising from his skin.  He looked down and saw smoke rising from his collar, smoke rising from the front of his shirt.  He saw scorched holes in his clothes and when he touched the pads of his fingers to the little fires burning on his skin, his fingertips came away wet, and then they burned too.  Tears, he realized, there are tear tracks rolling down his neck, there are damp spots in by the collar of his shirt where his brother had laid his head and wept into his chest.

He looked in the mirror and saw trails of flame-scorched skin running down his face, the blistered skin over his heart. He had thought of tears, of water and salt. Of rock salt laid in tracks across a window or in front of a door.  Salt in a saucer by the kitchen sink, keeping the ghosts from settling in a home. Why salt? he’d always wondered. 

Now he feels it burn through his flesh.  Now he thinks he’s beginning to know.

 

—

He remembers, of course: he remembers everything, but all his memories of the person that was here in this body before him are vague and splintered, thrown into a thousand different patterns like rainbows caught from prisms.

He drifts around, thinking, I kept his coat for a year.  He is still trying to understand why he did it.  What the fuck was that about? he wonders.  It occupies his thoughts until he feels ready to fly out of his body, so he goes to find Castiel.  He has to ask him, he has to understand.

Dean finds him leaning his head against the steering wheel of the Continental.  Dean slides around behind him. Castiel doesn’t say anything, not even when Dean slips his hands inside Castiel’s coat pockets.  His eyes stay closed, hidden from Dean, his eyelids pressing against the backs of his hands.  Dean finds himself wondering if he has been crying. Thinking it thrills him to the core.

He slides his tongue between Castiel’s teeth, he slips his hands underneath Castiel’s shirt. He plans to take everything from him, one by one.  He will take the coat from his shoulders and the shirt off his back, Dean will unzip his skin and take him apart: a present, a gift.  Dean will leave him hollowed and empty.  Dean will take it all from him, and hold it carefully in his soot-black heart, and he will examine it all later as he tries to understand what it is about Castiel that keeps him coming back.

Tell me, Dean says to him.  Dean presses kisses up his chest and takes his time around Castiel’s throat, he presses kisses up his neck, he feels the hot wet tears on Castiel’s cheeks and he plans to take those too.  Tell me, he says again.  You have to know.  Dean takes apart all the buttons on his shirt, one by one, he slips his hands underneath and strokes the soft skin of Castiel’s ribs. Dean presses him down into the seat, and Castiel lets him.

He kisses tears off Castiel’s cheek and feels them scorch his lips and his tongue.  He can see Castiel straight through to the bone, past the meat and salt water tucked under his skin.  He doesn’t look different, but Dean can see, already, all the small ways in which he is dying.

Why did I do that? he asks.  Why couldn’t I let you go? and Castiel says, I don’t know.

I love you, he whispers into Castiel’s ear, and Castiel turns his face away.  No, he says in return.  You never did, and Dean laughs and laughs and licks the tears off the corners of Castiel’s eyes.

—

He is standing outside feeling the rain on his face, rain slipping down his cheeks, dripping down his chin and it reminds him of teardrops, of crying.

I’m not going to cry for you, he tells Castiel.  When you die.

I know, Castiel says.

It won’t hurt me, he says again. He will watch Castiel’s body burn and he will tell himself he doesn’t understand.

—

He searches until he finds what he’s looking for in a lost and found box in a laundromat, a stained trenchcoat.  I kept this, he thinks. He looks at it with wonder, with disgust.  I kept this for a year.  Why did I do that?  Why did it hurt?

He wraps his hands around the bundle of fabric and brings it up to his face, because in his dreams he remembers doing this, holding it close, resting his head, but his skin burns when he presses his face into the ugly worn out coat.  He can feel them, the old forgotten ghosts of his own tears, staining through the fabric, and he knows then, why salt is the substance that hurts the most.

—

He goes back. He doesn’t know why.  He finds Castiel in the shadowy corners of a motel room and slips by his side.  

You can’t keep me out, he tells Castiel, he gloats.   

I never tried, Castiel says.

There’s something I have to know, he explains, but Castiel just looks at him, his face half in shadows, and there it is again, that need, to kill or fight or fuck or fly away; he doesn’t know what he wants to do, but something his holding him here.  Castiel looks at him with dark wet eyes and Dean has to know, has to understand, has to feel the burn; he lays his hands on Castiel’s cheeks, lets Castiel’s tears drip through his fingers and it hurts, it hurts so much and Dean loves it with all the heat left in the burning remnants of his heart.

Don’t cry, he says.  Dean kisses him, over and over.  Don’t cry.

He smokes out a few hours later, after Cas has gone to sleep.  He hovers around Castiel’s shoulders, pushes himself up against Castiel’s neck.  He thinks if he could cry, he’d be doing it now.  He can see everything that’s wrong with Castiel when he’s like this.  The way his bones are brittle, smoking like embers.  He crouches there by Castiel’s ear and murmurs to him, stupid useless things like You’re gonna be okay, I promise, and when he returns to his body he pushes Castiel’s head down on his shoulder, lets the teas drip down his collar and burn his neck, lets Castiel keep it there, even when the tears burn straight down through his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> ex voto suscepto, from the vow made


End file.
